The present invention generally relates to wheeled carts and particularly to a collapsible wheeled cart for separating, viewing, and transporting multiple items.
Wheeled carts have long been in use for a variety of purposes. A cart bears the weight of a load of items to be carried and frees the hands of a user for other activities. Wheeled carts are frequently used in grocery stores where customers view a large variety of merchandise and may select a relatively large quantity of separate items for purchase. In recent years consumers have favored large multi-purpose stores for items such as hardware, clothing, grocery, and other merchandise. Many of these stores offer shopping carts for use by customers while they are in the stores. Customers shopping for groceries, hardware and other products push a cart along as they shop. When an item is selected for purchase, it is placed in the cart. The customer may continue to shop for additional items without the need for hand carrying the items already selected.
Typical shopping carts have the capacity to hold a large quantity of merchandise. Although traditional shopping carts are generally effective for their intended purposes, there are some drawbacks. As a shopping cart becomes filled, the merchandise at the bottom tends to be crushed by the other items. This can be a problem with certain fragile food items such as eggs, bread, and the like. In addition, in stores which offer a wide variety of merchandise, a customer may wish to avoid mixing clothing, food, hardware, and other items. Traditional shopping carts do not have separate compartments to keep these items separated. Additionally, a customer may wish to view the items in a shopping cart to refresh the memory as to which items have already been selected and placed in the cart. When many items have been loaded in a typical shopping cart, it may be difficult to view all of them.
When the customer is finished shopping, he or she pays for all of the merchandise in the cart. After leaving the cashier, the customer may have to hand carry their merchandise to a parked vehicle. Some stores allow the customers to wheel the cart to a loading area or to wheel the cart to the location of the customer's vehicle, where the merchandise is transferred to the vehicle. Once the items have been transferred to a customer's vehicle, the shopping cart must be returned to a storage area of the store.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a collapsible shopping cart that can be owned by a user carried to and from the store in the user's vehicle. Further, it would be desirable to have a collapsible shopping cart having separate compartments for separating and easily viewing selected merchandise. In addition, it would be desirable to have a collapsible cart having a linear actuator for selectively moving the separate compartments relative to the cart rack or between storage (such as a vehicle trunk) and use configurations (on the cart).